Cognosos raises $7.1 million in Series A round

Cognosos, a sensing-as-a-service (SaaS) company, said it completed a $7.1 million Series A financing led by Cox Enterprises. Other investors include Covalent Partners and CheckFree Founder Pete Kight. The company also announced that Cisco veteran Sandeep Vohra will take over as CEO, and Kight will join the company's board of directors.

Cognosos, a startup in the Advanced Technology Development Center's ATDC Signature portfolio, was founded in 2014 with patented technology developed at the Smart Antenna Lab at Georgia Tech. In the last year, the company's cloud-based, software defined wireless platform has seen a rapidly growing roster of successful deployments in the automotive sector.

"We are excited about our partnership with Cox Enterprises and the new investment to fuel further growth in a rapidly expanding IoT market," said Sanjoy Malik, co-founder and chairman. "Cognosos is building a world class team starting at the top. Sandeep brings over 15 years of relevant experience from Cisco and Scientific Atlanta. He led a $500M global business unit serving enterprise and service provider markets, covering digital media, cloud services and unified communications. We are glad to have him as part of our team."

Pete Kight, who joins the board, founded CheckFree in 1981 with a vision of providing electronic funds transfer services to businesses and consumers. Over the following 27 years it became the standard for electronic bill payment. CheckFree, with revenues of $1.1 billion, was sold to Fiserv, Inc. in Dec. 2007 for $4.4 billion.

"Cox has worked with the founders for several years, so it's exciting to see them bringing more new ideas to life right here in Atlanta," said Duncan O'Brien, Cox Enterprises' senior vice president and general manager of corporate strategy and investments. "Cognosos has a cost-effective, flexible technology solution that can collect data in a variety of environments where it hasn't been possible before. We think Cognosos has great potential to ramp up efficiency and reduce costs across a variety of businesses and settings."

Cognosos enables unprecedented improvement in wireless network performance with its patented RadioCloud technology that extends the physical layer of wireless networks into the cloud.

According to co-founder and CTO Jim Stratigos, "The only thing that customers care about when it comes to the IoT is how can they improve their businesses with better data. RadioCloud gives us the power to drive down the cost of collecting data from assets to essentially zero, allowing customers to focus on using data that is collected to improve their bottom line."